“You put it to her?”

“Straight. If you hadn’t been she would, of course, have confessed to you—to keep me in the dark about the real one.”

Poor Voyt laughed out again. “Oh, you dear souls!”

“Besides,” his companion pursued, “I was not in want of that evidence.”

“Then what other had you?”

“Her state before you came—which was what made me ask you how much you had seen her. And her state after it,” Mrs. Dyott added. “And her state,” she wound up, “while you were here.”

“But her state while I was here was charming.”

“Charming. That’s just what I say.”

She said it in a tone that placed the matter in its right light—a light in which they appeared kindly, quite tenderly, to watch Maud wander away into space with her lovely head bent under a theory rather too big for it. Voyt’s last word, however, was that there was just enough in it—in the theory—for them to allow that she had not shown herself, on the occasion of their talk, wholly bereft of sense. Her consciousness, if they let it alone—as they of course after this, mercifully must—was, in the last analysis, a kind of shy romance. Not a romance like their own, a thing to make the fortune of any author up to the mark—one who should have the invention or who could have the courage; but a small, scared, starved, subjective satisfaction that would do her no harm and nobody else any good. Who but a duffer—he stuck to his contention—would see the shadow of a “story” in it?